I’m going to jump right in on this topic and not bother with a warm-up. The title is self-explanatory in the Midwest, because a “food chain” here actually involves food.
When we first hear it, the food chain allegory may confuse the Midwesterner. We look a bit askance when we hear, “He’s obviously pretty low on the food chain.” What? Are they calling him an egg? …a calf? …a seedling? Is he a farmer? …a locker owner? …a milk hauler?
Midwesterners think of a food chain as the route food takes to get to our tables. Even in our metropolitan areas we know where food comes from. You can’t drive down I35 from Minneapolis to Kansas City and not catch a whiff of the obvious.
We start growing things from seeds, and sources of bull semen can be found in the yellow pages. People here are responsible for produce from planting to harvest, and for meat from the farrowing pen to the slaughterhouse. There’s a middle man in the food chain, too, and lots of people think that’s where food comes from. Midwesterners know the folks who think that aren’t even IN the food chain, let alone able to identify somebody’s position in it.
City folk naively think of farmers and the residents of any town with a population under 50,000, as low on the food chain. We shake our heads – man, if it weren’t for farmers, those guys wouldn’t have the strength to call us names. The food chain starts with farmers, for cryin’ in the night. As a matter of fact, the entire economy of Midwestern small towns revolves around the farmer, from whence the food chain originates. Duh.
Or, in the words of Napoleon Dynamite, “Gaaaaah!! You are such a dork!”
As an aside, quilters get this all the time. Not only do we suffer from the stereotype as people who don’t have enough significant work to keep themselves busy, there is also the perception that cutting up fabric and sewing it back together again, repeatedly, is only interesting to somebody pretty low on the food chain. Folks better think twice before they dis a quilter, because we are often at the highest level of the Midwestern food chain – we prepare the food just before you eat it. Aha! Chew on that for awhile!
The food chain in the corporate world refers to one entity being strong enough to consume a weaker entity. We learn all about that food chain in physical science in the ninth grade, starting with a tiny amoeba and working up to, say, a hippopotamus. A little minnow is eaten by a Northern Pike, a human feasts on a duck dinner, and a python snarfles up a bicyclist, unless the bicyclist rides a Mongoose™, purportedly the “best in performance bikes since 1974”. Clearly, the corporate food chain is a seek-and-destroy system, where if “you snooze, you lose", and somebody else gets to do a jig in the end zone.
That is the polar opposite of the Midwesterner’s food chain. There is no advantage to wishing ill-will on your fellow farmers, and the folks in town are as apt to help out a family who suffers a setback as the neighbors in that family’s township. We have Catholic Knights and Thrivent Financial for Lutherans waiting with matching funds, and many hands to pitch in when the call for help goes out. We bring combines, balers, hot dishes, babysitting help, and rides to dialysis. We put names on prayer chains and sign up for walkathons and dunk tanks. No matter where you are on the food chain, you’re important and your role is valued.
Some of that cutthroat, too-big-for-your-britches stuff happens here, too. The difference is, it really stands out in rural communities, and is usually not rewarded. It may be tolerated, but not rewarded. We believe there is room for improvement in everyone’s behavior, and hope those offenders will come to their senses someday.
Yes, the food chain here does involve food, but it involves people, too. Calmar, Iowa, has been recognizing farmers with an annual festival for the past 100 years. Being at the bottom of the food chain is a place of honor, noble and essential to life everywhere. Food for the body is planted and harvested here, but in the process we cultivate food for our souls.
Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns 2007
